Principles of Concurrent and Distributed Programming, Second Edition

Chapter 3. The Critical Section Problem

Introduction

This chapter presents a sequence of attempts to solve the critical section problem for two processes, culminating in Dekker’s algorithm. The synchronization mechanisms will be built without the use of atomic statements other than atomic load and store. Following this sequence of algorithms, we will briefly present solutions to the critical section problem that use more complex atomic statements. In the next chapter, we will present algorithms for solving the critical section problem for N processes.

Algorithms like Dekker’s algorithm are rarely used in practice, primarily because real systems support higher synchronization primitives like those to be discussed in subsequent chapters (though see ...